


Your Eyes

by VarjoRuusu



Series: Steve/Bucky Soulmate One-Shots [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Soulmarks, Soulmate AU, soulmate prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-26
Updated: 2016-03-26
Packaged: 2018-05-29 05:01:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6360490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VarjoRuusu/pseuds/VarjoRuusu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based off the promt: Your eyes match the color of your soulmates hair.</p><p>When Bucky was born his eyes were colorless. </p><p>When Steve was born his eyes were so dark they were almost black.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Eyes

The day James Buchanan Barnes was born his mother smiled and cooed over his colorless eyes. Her own Hazel eyes twinkled as she held her new baby, knowing that her baby would be older then his soul mate and she just had to wait until they were born for her baby to be as absolutely perfect as possible.

When he was 14 months old, Bucky’s eyes turned the color of pale straw, two days after his first sister was born with pale brown eyes.

 

…

 

When Steve Rogers was born his eyes were black. His mother smiled, her now blue eyes sad as she smiled at her sister, the only one who was still there for her.

 

"I bet his soulmate is just wonderful," Sarah cooed. "With beautiful dark hair."

 

…

 

When Steve was seven he was knocked down by a bully, the name or number had blurred together, it was such a regular occurrence.

  
“Don’t you ever give up?” a voice above him asked.

  
“Why would I do that?” Steve panted as he looked up. “I had him on the ropes.”

  
“Sure you did,” the other kid scoffed as he held out his hand and pulled Steve to his feet. “I’m James, but my sisters call me Bucky. Actually pretty much everyone calls me Bucky.”

  
“Steve Rogers,” the other replied. His hand tingled when it grasped Bucky’s.

 

…

  
When Howard Stark cornered him in the back of a storage room, Steve wanted nothing more then to punch his lights out.

  
“So, you got a girl? You met ‘em yet?” he prodded, not allowing Steve to escape.

  
“I don’t know, Stark, aside from the color of my eyes matching the color of their hair, how am I supposed to know?” Steve grumbled uncomfortably.

  
“You always had the scar on the back of your hand?” Howard asked, indicating Steve’s right hand where a crescent shaped scar curved across the space between this thumb and forefinger.

  
“Since I was seven,” Steve shrugged. “Got it in a fight after school.”

  
“Anything else happen after school?” Howard asked, seemingly delighted.

  
“I think it was the day I met Bucky, if you really want to know,” Steve sighed.

  
“Hmm,” Howard hummed. He turned and walked away leaving Steve beyond puzzled. With a sigh Steve sagged against a shelf and rubbed his eyes tiredly.

  
…

  
“Why is Howard so interested in my scar?” Steve asked Peggy a few days later. “He won’t quit staring at it.”

  
Peggy glanced at Howard and then down at Steve’s hand.

  
“Steve, that’s not at scar,” Peggy said quietly. “It’s a soulmark. It’s the second piece, I mean, you couldn’t possibly find your soulmate by their hair color alone, there are only a few distinct colors and it would take years to match a certain shade and even then…”

  
“So then what is this?” Steve asked, his breath speeding up. “My mother never mentioned a second part, she didn’t really want to talk about it because she lost my dad.”

  
Peggy sighed and shook her head. “I know, it’s hard. When my brother was killed his fiancé was devastated. That mark, it comes the first time you touch your soulmate, the first place they touch you. You hand would have tingled…Steve?”

  
Steve was leaning against the table gasping for breath as realization washed over him.

  
“Bucky,” he whispered, barely loud enough for Peggy to hear. She gasped quietly and raised a hand to her mouth.

  
…

  
When Steve heard Bucky’s unit had been captured by HYDRA, he dove out of a plane. After rescuing Bucky, and at least two or three hundred other men, walking 30 miles back to camp, and spending five hours being debriefed, he finally had a chance to corner his friend.

  
“Did you know?” Steve demanded, raising Bucky’s right hand and examining the four small marks that matched exactly the size of his seven year old fingertips. Bucky sighed and shook his head.

  
“Not at first, Steve, I swear. I didn’t even know about the other mark until Jane met her match. She’d fallen and cut herself and the first thing he did was move her hair out of the way. Left a mark all along the top of her eyebrow,” Bucky grinned, reaching up to trace the same place over Steve’s eyebrow.

  
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Steve asked. Bucky sighed.

  
“Steve, it was the same day I got my draft letter.”

  
“Draft…Buck, you told me you enlisted,” Steve said softly.

  
Bucky shrugged. “You were always looking at me with those big eyes, I figured I could at least go off and die with you thinkin’ I was a hero or somethin’.”

  
“Oh, Bucky,” Steve said sadly, dragging his friend into a hug. “You’ve always been my hero.”

  
…

 

When Bucky fell from the train a year and a half later, Steve couldn’t bear to look into his own eyes. He knew they would be devoid of color, for the first time in his life. He was surprised to find though, when Peggy forced him to look in her small compact, that his eyes were tinted with blue. Having any color left after losing your soulmate, it was rare, but not impossible. It only meant that the connection had been so deep that a little bit of color was left, a stain of sorts.

 

"He’ll always be a part of you, Steve," she said quietly, her hand on his shoulder.

 

"I don’t know if I can do this without him," Steve gasped and Peggy sighed, holding him close.

 

Three days later Steve was reported killed in action somewhere over the north Atlantic. Howard Stark never stopped looking for him, until the day he died.

 

No one saw Steve’s eyes darken every ten or fifteen years and then lighten again. No one knew that somewhere, somehow, Bucky was still out there, trying to find his way home and blocked at every turn.

  
...

  
Three years after Steve came out of the ice Natasha’s eyes widened when he offered her a beer one evening, during the weekly movie night Tony and Clint had enforced in the Avengers Tower. She didn’t react in any other way, but she messaged everyone else immediately and warned them not to say a word to Steve on pain of death. They all knew he refused to look at his own reflection because he didn’t want to see his pale blue eyes.

 

Expect they weren’t pale anymore. They were a striking deep blue, surrounded by a dark ring of black.

  
…

  
“He’s a ghost,” Natasha said.

  
…

  
“Bucky?”

  
“Who the hell is ‘Bucky’?”

  
…

  
“He’s the kind you stop,” Sam said.

  
“You’re my mission,” the Winter Soldier said.  
“Finish it,” Steve said.

  
…

  
“He’s been missing for almost six months and Steve won’t stop chasing him,” Clint said quietly, glancing around at his fellow Avengers.

 

"What I want to know, is how come his eyes are blue?" Tony asked curiously. "I thought soulmate eyes matched hair color and I’ve seen the feed of Barnes there, his hair isn’t exactly patriot blue."

 

"The darkest black is usually tinted with blue," Bruce pointed out.

 

"My mom told me when I was a kid that you’re born either with no color in your eyes, or the color of your soulmates hair," Clint said as he leaned on the table, watching the footage of Steve and Bucky fighting on the streets of Rome, one of the places Steve had caught up to the Winter Soldier. "Usually your own color develops when you’re five or so, but it’s superseded by the soulmate color, so people usually don’t see it unless their soulmate isn’t born for several years or dies young. In some cases the bond can intensify the original color and leaves a ring of the soulmate color along with it. A perfect blending if you will."

 

"I’ve never seen that before," Tony scoffed and Clint glanced at Natasha who shrugged.

 

"That’s because it’s dangerous for people to know," Clint said as he reached up and popped a blue contact lens out of his eye, revealing a lighter blue surrounded by a bright flaming red. Tony and Bruce both snapped their eyes to Natasha who had also removed a contact to show a lilac color surrounded by bright gold.

 

"Oh," Bruce managed.

 

"Holy shit," Tony said articulately.

 

"I really wish we could get a look at Bucky’s eyes," Clint mused and Natasha chuckled as she replaced her contact.

 

"What are we doing, playing matchmaker?" Tony asked and Bruce shrugged.

 

"We’re observing," Clint said lightly.

 

"Right," Tony muttered, unconvinced that it was any of their business, but happy to be his same old nosey self. “Do we have a plan to bring him in?”

 

…

 

"Bucky, it’s me, don’t you remember?" Steve panted, a hard fight having won him a look at Bucky’s face without the mask he still so often wore, even in the heat of Jordan, where he has just finished dismantling yet another HYDRA cell.

  
“I don’t know you,” the unmasked assassin growled as he attacked Steve.

  
“Like hell you don’t, you’ve known me almost your whole life,” Steve bit back as he landed as solid punch on Bucky’s jaw.

  
“Steve?” Bucky asked, surprised.

  
“Huh,” Steve said. “Guess Nat was right. Cognitive recalibration really does work.”

  
Of course it wasn’t that simple, both Bucky and Steve endured months of hell, nightmares, flashbacks, Tony Stark, but in the end it was all worth it.

  
…

 

When Steve was thirty-five/one hundred and however many years, he looked in the bathroom mirror one morning to find his eyes the most spectacularly horrendous shade of hot pink imaginable.

"Bucky!!!"

**Author's Note:**

> I changed it a bit because really, how are you going to know your soulmate by your hair alone?
> 
> Also what it says after Bucky falls and when Clint is talking differs because times change and a greater understanding comes of soul bonds. In modern times you develop your own eye color anyway but in the 40s they had no idea that was possible. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed! I can be found on tumblr at tumblr.com/lgavengers


End file.
